Where I'm headed, I'm not sure, and that feels right. So many things, such a long year. I can't name what this time is, or what it feels like exactly, but I'm working on it.

The abridged version: I am back out on my own, doing work for some really smart clients -- some web 2.0ey fast companies like BubbleShare, with CEO smartie Albert "24/7" Lai, whom my blog-brother Michael O'Connor Clarke introduced me to when he heard I was once again a free agent. I'm also working with some more-offline-than-on clients, and some who are a little of both.

There are definitely scales of efficiency in working with clients that understand, appreciate, and want to participate in what's going on online. For instance, you wouldn't think that a click-and-tell photo sharing company like BubbleShare would have much in common with an company in the gum industry, like ElmiTaste -- except that both companies are led by people who understand that their markets are aggregating around areas of interest on the Internet. And that they can talk to them there, as long as they give a shit and don't just pretend to give a shit. That makes these companies smarter than many of their "industry" counterparts who prefer to focus and compete vertically, by industry, and horizontally, by product (or feature sets).

Word to the Web 2.0 Wise: Do not spend your bucks fighting the vertical-industry, horizontal-feature war. Unless you have So So So much money it doesn't matter. And, hey, if that's the case, well, I can help there too; I mean I'm just sayin...

Kevin is right that the net is not a tree. But it's not a grid either. And companies looking to get closer to their markets by interacting with people around the things that matter to them can't continue to view the marketplace primarily through the lens of their industry and product and how those variables align with their next closest competitor.

Life is officially way to webby for that.

It takes a new kind of filter to cut through the noise and really hear the heartbeats on the net.

The heartbeat, the cadence. Like listening to a little tiny baby in a mom's belly. That's where suddenly, every piece of what I'm discerning for one client somehow, often not directly but in a loop-de-loop, odd-meter sort of way, ties in with the other, and the other, and the other, lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

It's stunning to uncover these patterns, these rhythms. Sometimes it's electric, and there's no one home to tell, and so I call Chris, and I tell him, and the best part is I can tell him again the next time we talk, and he'll say wow, because it'll be new all over again, partly because of his short-term memory issues and partly because it IS new all over again. Familiar and new. Every single time.

At least to me.

The speed with which our stories are weaving themselves is, I don't know, surreal? And you now what--it jazzes me to no end. That lub-dub thing.

And you can tell me it's not true, that there's no heartbeat on the net, and you can make fun of all the people who've made themselves vulnerable here by laying down a record of who they are--when they're right and when they're wrong, when they're up and when they're so, so down--and you can even say, who cares. And you can even say, sure, go ahead and drink the kool-aid, girl.

Rodrigo got some good footage of Robert Scoble at the CESCamp Funhouse last night... Sounds like those little Channel 9 guys have been heat tested. Scoble channels his Inner Pyromaniac. WEEE! Albert, bring back some good swag, kay--don't let Robert light it all on fire.

January 06, 2006

Oh Canada! We've got some major web2.0sky coming from the U.S.'s best neighbors to the North, and I say that because during Web 1.0 I wasn't using two Canadian products simultaneously on my blog. In fact, I forgot where Canada even was. Now I use both Qumana (no work relationship) and BubbleShare (yes work relationship) in my regular blogging and daily actvities of living (online).

What I like about BS is all the stuff I've already said. Here's an example (a daily life example). My nephew who I haven't seen since he was 10 is now 27 and he is in Europe playing Rugby and looking, for all the shock value I needed at the moment, like my husband at that same age. (It's his brother's first born). Anyway, he's borrowing computers on his trek across Europe, and he emailed George with some pix from the road--of course, he attached them to the email. Because unless you're going to get all registered and tied into a setting up an account and telling all about your life and your pet hamsters, attaching them is the easiest way to quickly send pics. But damn, who wants to get 7 meg of email attachments? And then download them and open them with your suckass photo-related software because you can't afford Photoshop?

NOT ME. NOT ANYMORE. It took me 5 seconds to upload those photos into a bubbleshare album and send the link to George, who's now sending the link back to his nephew, and on to various family members. No more 7 megs or Uncle So-And-So wondering how to view the pix.

We sent the young ghost of my husband past the admin link to his pix, and now he can upload new ones, and we can subscribe to the RSS feed.

WHAT IS NOT COOL ABOUT THAT?

Now, Qumana--I'm writing in it now--I love the WYSISYGedness, I like the UI, the nice fat buttons and the all the handy 'ms-wordy-type' text features. MOST OF ALL I like the tagging. I can't do this in Blogger without Multiple Pains in the Asses. Qumana may not be my end destination for an out-of-the-blog-tool composer, but it's fine right now. It's fast. Reliable. And I can finally do the tagging I should have been doing for 133 years but don't like to bother with.

It handles pictures perfectly, it brings in WYSIWYG posts from Firefox copy-and-paste with elegant eeeaaazzzeee.

I'm surprised there aren't more cross tagging tools that just sit in a little place and all they do is read and tag your copy based and they could show you a little running number of posts w/ the same tag, so you know if you do BubbleShare there might be 200 technorati tags while Bubble Share has like 3, and so you make the determination which tag you want to used (or both). Anyway, blah blah be quiet and stuff jeneane.

So I just wanted to say Thanks, Canada. If you could send some ideas for Healthcare down our way I'd be much obliged.

Although my name and bio currently appear on the site, I am no longer associated with The Content Factor. As I've indicated previously, information relative to my business can be found on my current sites: www.jsessum.com and www.sessum.com, and the number of blogs and other publications I write for.

Thank you. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

(Disclosure++: I may delete this post when the requested information is removed from that site.)

Get yourself to the 7 p.m. CES unconference tonight at the Hawthorne Suites' Salon 1 meeting room. Folks will be heading over this eve. See the CES wiki for up to the minute tips and information, including bike rentals for getting around!

CES Trivia: What industry analyst is using pedal power to get around the MASSIVE convention layout?

Conferences come and conferences go, panels come and panels go, keynotes come and keynotes go, but BlogHer is here to stay. Disclosure: I'm on the advisory board and I like these women, and if you're experiencing the current $500/night hotel rates for CES, know that when Lisa gets it together, she gets it TOGETHER, with a $75/night commitment at the Hyatt San Jose for six total days, or is it seven.

January 04, 2006

I'm familiar with familiar death, loss so severe that its magnitude alters human DNA. That's the kind of death I know best.

So when casual death presents itself, as in the death of a friend, not a very close friend, but a friend I've spent a few dozen hours with over the last three years, on and off, not the kind of friend to call for a shoulder to cry on, but, you know, to offer a ride to a party to, to spend an afternoon watching a football game with, sharing tacos, more of a friend's friend, but still, a friend--well when that less-than-knee-shattering death comes, I'm not sure what to do with it.

I don't know mild grief. Only the devastating kind.

I don't know where to put the smaller losses.

I'm talking about Joanne, a friend who died of a heart attack today, unexpectedly.

Well not totally unexpectedly, I mean, she'd had a stroke in previous years, but she'd been fine of late, and, well, really, yah, okay, unexpectedly would be the right word considering she was walking her dog and died on the sidewalk before she ever reached the hospital from what I've heard.

It's the kind of thing that makes people say, "Well I just saw that person XX ago!"

As if such sightings should render them safe.

I rationalize unfamiliar death. You can sort of see the process. This isn't how a normal person talks about the death of a friend. Even a not-best friend. Even on a blog. But it's how I'm telling you.

Joanne at her best was the earth-tanned and fit older women who loved New Mexico but was stuck here closer to family during her post-stroke years. She was also a woman who was never without her old english sheep dog. I mean never. Not for a second.

I've never seen a human being and an animal as tightly knit as these two. Bathroom, work, drive-thru, shopping--never apart. Joanne loved her Frosty and that dog worshiped her, anticipating every move and every mood.

Tonight Frosty is sitting with her muzzle on the front door knob of my other friend's house waiting for her best friend to come home. But she's not coming home.

In time, the dog will be okay as far as the day-to-day stuff goes--there are more than a couple of options for who'll take her in. Another friend, who has a friend who's a vet, says some dogs are so attached that they grieve themselves to death when their owner dies.

I picture what that kind of grief looks like, and there's the familiar kind I know well. I understand the dog's loss. My own loss, in this case, I don't have an opinion about. 'Cause I'm miswired that way.

So what I wanted to say is, Joanne wasn't a religious person. In fact she was raised Mormon and eventually 'got out' in conjunction with getting out of a bad marriage. She didn't want any big to-do when she died. Just to be cremated. So there won't be a service as far as we know.

I've talked about it with Jenna, who spent more than a few long walks with Joanne and her big hairy dog. Jenna was both surprised and sad to hear about Joanne's death. We decided to donate a little money to the ASPCA in Joanne's honor, because it seems like the right thing to do. That and a big box of biscuits for Frosty.

Anne 2.0 has a very organized approach to how she reads and organizes other blogs she reads, and I think I'm following her when I summarize that her blogroll is a subset or byproduct of bloggers whose feeds she subscribes to, or at least they are related and organized in relation to her subscribed-to feeds.

I say that my blogroll is neither related to my RSS subscriptions nor to do I consider the folks on it the 'who's-who' of blogging. They are simply this: other blogs I don't ever want to forget to read, and, through the marvels of blogrolling.com, a little asterisk even tells me when there's new stuff to posted there. How Web 2.0! Except it all happened a year or two ago.

I think Anne's relationship between her feeds and her blogroll is interesting because it sounds like RSS came first for her, then a blogroll. On the other hand, my blogroll is O-L-D, predating both RSS and jumping up and down by a couple of years. In that way, it actually bears little resemblance to the feeds in my aggregator. I use my RSS feeds to subscribe to information sources - searches on technorati, client-related sources, and a few blogs I read every day without fail. But it's not the same as my blogroll.

I view bloglines as a tool; I look at my blogroll as my way around.

I'm always disappointed when I'm done with my RSS feeds--when there's nothing left bolded. But that disappointment lasts for just a couple of seconds and it's off to my blogroll to see who's been up to what. I'm even happy when I click on sites who've moved. I do the lazy thing. I go back to the old blog and follow the usual final-posting link to the new blog. I make a mental note, JENEANE you've GOT to update that link, and then I forget, and I take the same trip back to them the next time.

You guys are right, I do have to clean my blogroll up. I know some people have two or three links. But every time I see that, I remember how i REFOUND them after not reading them for a long time and added them only to go--HEY I added them AGAIN. Cool. yah well. blogging's messy sometimes.

GOOD.

My blogroll is not an information repository or a library of links. It's my little scroogle map to places I never want to forget my way to. I may take out my triptick once a week, once a month, or once an hour. But I wouldn't get rid of it, and i want to show YOU the way to some of these fine places too. You may go. You may not. You may just add them to your own map to parts unknown.

I will tell you one thing--I refuse to view bloglife through an aggregator. It doesn't excite me. It's a great way to have information delivered. It's a suckass way to experience the Internet.

For that I hop from site to site, and I use my blogroll and other people's blogrolls (Doc's and Frank's are great) to do that.

The CES Wiki's kickin' as the rest of the bunch, including our own Albert of Team BubbleShare, descends on Las Vegas. Wish I was going to be there to see the gang, meet-n-geek, and the like, but am glad to miss the hubbub of it. To be honest, something about 43 and momness, client demands, and school's-out-for-winter-break require less hububub than the usual amount.

Frank Paynter notices some omissions from the Women's Media Center's many linkrolls. I'm glad Frank paynted out some of the missing women. Not so sure I'm down with a site that bills itself as "the only place for news on women," because, well, this is the Internet and you're not the only anything -- except you if you're lucky.

Somehow I don't see the BlogHer group or BlogSheroes either, although I might have just missed them--it could use some better link organization. It is nice to see the oldest and the nearest-to-my-heart women's gropu blog listed, BlogSisters.

I think it's always in good taste to suggest links to one another, whether you're a 'media center' a 'pajama media' a 'bandana media," or just a regular blogger. I like it when people suggest links to me because sometimes I'm just airheaded and forget to notice stuff. I know Frank would remind me in the same nice way he reminds the WMC. I know I'd go 'duh' and fix it.

January 03, 2006

it's high time that somebody decided to bitch slap you all who think you've become too big, too PC, too journaljistic, or too embroiled in blogdrama to have a blogroll.

Clearly, your mama didn't raise you right.

Once upon a time, in the land of blogs, there were pixels and publish buttons. some people started arranging those pixels into words and publishing them online once, twice, sometimes 15 times a day. No one cared.

Then came the blogroll. The blogroll said: this is who i like to read, who do you like to read? Oh Cool! I see you--Do you see me? Oh Cool! I will check out who you like to read. Why don't you check out who I like to read? Oh cool! I will add that person from yours and you from mine and his from hers and theirs from theirs. Along with our posts, blogolls were streetsigns to regular coversation spots.

Some future date and time to be determined, probably winter or an Alaskan resort would work best, Mary Lu and I are going to have a Chicken-Soup-Cook-Off and you will be the judges. She has some ingredients I'm curiously considering... hmm. turnips? sure you don't mean PARSnips Mary, Hmmm? Bay leaves... Hmmm--I believe I remember a certain bay leaf in my own grandma's chicken soup.....I may have to revisit my ingredients.

I'll see your bay leaf and raise you some no-yolk egg noodles, and may the best short-cut chicken soup maker win!

January 02, 2006

I can't get out of my father's bedroom this week. You must think it's strange. What the hell is she doing. I can't follow her, practitioner to patient, all mixed up, a permalink to the heart of a little girl frozen so far back, this grown woman and mother of 43, this fine writer, this netizen and blogwalker, business woman and ballbreaker.

I can't tell you. Because I don't know.

Wasn't kidding when I asked of David: we've 'written ourselves into existence,' my good friend, and now what. Is that all there is; are we here to practice, to preach, or to write ourselves back out again.

and how far out.

and what's the price we pay for going.

and all of that. and more.

While my father's cancer was wasting his body, I watched television with him in his antique poster bed, the kind that are back in style now. Some of my friends have remakes of these beds. I don't say when I visit: My father died in a bed just like that. I marvel at the noticing instead.

Sometimes its years and years between new memories. They come easy, slow, once every so often, or I have days-long remembering of light from a window hitting the polished planks of the wood floor just so, or the scent of the wind from the barn with a manure pile in need of spreading, or the crease of his cotton pajama bottoms with the cuffs. Other times they come in a flash, no warning, jolted, a shot to my ribs -- how did I forget that.

There is a purpose in forgetting, and there is meaning in remembering.

Don't ever forget that.

Every day this week when I rest, I see part of his room, from the inside. The far left corner. Trying to re-see it is like tracing veins in a palm you can't see in order to know what the hand looks like.

Where was I going with all of this--I'm not done. The remembering this time is slow, and I'm folding myself into it. Each tiny glimpse of his face is so precious, been gone so long.

Something about the Internet is helping me remember.

It is all in the hyperlinks. We backtrack and follow, the weaving and unweaving. Traumatic memory is anything but linear.

Plans for an unconference at CES are shaping up nicely! CESCamp signups are hitting the wiki fast and furious (but wikis don't mind). Now, with a couple of short days til liftoff, if you can help Albert and Aidan out by suggesting a venue or saying, "Okay we'll meet at your suite and I get dibs on the double bed," that would be awesome. I'll be manning some virtual ship headed for somewhere interesting during the experiment that is CESCamp. Mary Lu I hope your going and that you've got our little plan engaged. ;-)

The 1-800-lasvegas operators are now sort of standing by--apparently with New Years behind them, rooms are opening up. If you can add any helpful hotel info, have at the wiki.

I'm thinking to set up a google group to keep up with happenings pre/post, and link it off the wiki? Many of you are experienced about how to extend get-togethers into longer-lasting conversations (tastes great! less filling!) using blogs, wikis, uncons, camps, groups -- and hopefully an IRC channel? I'm all ears and promise to post/disseminate/extrapolate what I learn here. Boooya!

David's latest Joho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum is out. Checkout his Anti-Executive Summary on the Wikipedia article. "Things this piece does not say." I may begin anti-summarizing my posts. And all business agreements. And Jenna's chore list.

BONUS: Cluetrain Trivial Persuit Question: Which Two Co-Authors are playing with paper this week? Answer: David and Chris don't know this because I learned this from each separately, but they're both getting in touch with their inner scanners this week. Chris is OCR-ing on some old HP relic, and David is Digitizing on a new Cannon, and when you give these guys some tools that do things with paper, you just never know what might happen.

Of course there is no license--no MBA, CPA, or DDS required--not even good taste, thank God. Just some skin and flesh in the game, if you're man enough to make yourself vulnerable. Because starting all of this and keeping at it is no simple thing. Or maybe it is.

The challenges of writing will present themselves immediately. And the challenges are great. Are you a fool? Are you naive? Are you saying too much? Too little? Are you bold enough to say THAT in public? Are you stupid enough? All sorts of gremlins sit on your shoulder whispering in your ear. Some are encouragements. Some are seductions. Some groundless fears. Some dangerous delusions. How a writer responds to these whisperings will determine what kind of writer he or she will become. It’s a very personal thing. My own approach is to listen carefully, then ignore all of it.

While we're at it, on the notion of 'blooks,' I'd argue that the first blook was Locke's The Bombast Transcripts, featuring "browser-free" content from EGR, published in January 2002.

More nuggets from the interview:

Well, if you mean influence as it’s usually measured, then the clear answer is the Top 100 hit magnets on Technorati. No one could say, and I wouldn’t suggest, that they’re not having a lot of influence on whomever is hitting their blogs. They must, right? And the more people who hit those sites, the more people will hit those sites. In this sense, we’ve replicated the mass media model. Which is inevitable in some sense. I mean, there will always be a top-10, a top-100, in anything you can measure. It’s like fashion. Beige is the new black. Chartreuse is the new black. Whatever.

Then there’s the very different phenomenon of going to x-random site and reading something, hearing something, seeing something that changes your mind, touches your heart. It could be someone you’ve never heard of. It could be someone whose voice is just emerging. His or her real voice. Real in the sense that it cuts through all the posturing and bullshit and reminds you what you are, what we are. That kind of influence can’t be measured the same way. And it’s possible that, by measuring things that can be easily measured, we miss entirely the things that can’t be measured at all.